A machine to machine (M2M) communication refers to any communication scheme which does not require human intervention in the process of communication. In other words, the M2M communication refers to a communication for providing persons or intelligent equipment with object information using communication networks, or allowing persons or intelligent equipment to control states of objects. The M2M communication may be variously referred to as a machine type communication (MTC), Internet of things (IoT), a smart device communication (SDC), a machine oriented communication (MOC), or an object to object intelligent network (O2N).
The M2M communication is based on the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) standard. According to the ETSI standard, an M2M communication system may include an M2M network domain associated with a data collection/storage procedure, and a network application domain associated with a data request/utilization procedure. More specifically, the M2M network domain may collect M2M data (e.g., sensed data) using a plurality of M2M devices (e.g., sensors). The network application domain may request the collected M2M data to the M2M network domain. When receiving the M2M data in response from the M2M network domain, the network application domain may use the received M2M data according to service purposes.
In the M2M network, a data collection is performed by M2M devices and/or an M2M gateway. Such data collection may be performed according to a variety of schemes. For example, M2M devices may collect (or create) M2M data through a sensing procedure, and store the collected data. Alternatively, the M2M devices may transfer the collected (or created) M2M data to an M2M gateway to which the M2M devices are connected. In this case, the M2M gateway may collect M2M data from the M2M devices, and store the collected M2M data.
Such M2M data collection is performed using limited network resources. For example, with respect to the M2M data collection, there may be limitations such as (i) the limited number of M2M devices to be deployed for an M2M network, (ii) the limitation of an available electric power of each M2M device, (iii) an network environment implementation for collection of accurate data, (iv) a limited network bandwidth.
Furthermore, in the case that valueless data (or garbage data) such as overlapped data are collected, an M2M system may waste limited resources to collect and store the valueless data. Particularly, such collection and storage of the valueless data may result in a variety of problems in connection with a power consumption of M2M entities, a data storage, a data reliability (particularly, in case of a high quality multimedia service), use of network bandwidth, a device lifecycle, an expenditure associated with device deployment, and so forth.
Accordingly, it may be required to efficiently manage the limited network resources employed to collect M2M data. Particularly, in view of network management, it may be required to collect a variety of M2M data, and to obtain the M2M data including as much available information as possible.